It's going to take 2 or 3 days with the faster settings ;-) With the slower settings, which lead to only a slightly better preservation of fine detail, the encoding time would nearly double. However you have to keep in mind that Harmy is using a Core2Duo Mobile to encode, which is pretty slow compared to newer generations of CPUs.

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<p>Couldn't have said it better myself!</p>
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Bobocop said:

 

If slower settings lead to only a very slight increase in fine detail, I'd still say it's worth the extra wait.

Of course, I have no idea what specifically you're referring to. But just sayin' that this is an important project since this is likely the closest we're going to get to a true HD remaster of the original for a long long time. So any little bit extra that can be squeezed out of it is worth it in my book :)

 

+1!!!

Yeah, I don't see any meaningful difference there.

On my 15 inches monitor, I see no difference at all. But this is my computer monitor.

How on my 45 inches TV monitor, there might be a difference.

Anyone interested in loaning Harmy an i5 or i7 box? Anyone local? It's a bit late at this point but better late than never. I'd loan if I had one, unfortunately I'm stuck with the same Core2Duo mobile (P8400). 

You can spot a minor difference between the comparison shots when switching back and forth between them. It's mainly in the grain pattern. But you won't notice any of that during playback anyway.

No difference here on a 27" HD monitor. I think the faster settings are fine.

If you are giving your source the bitrate that it needs, then you won't notice much difference with the slower settings.  Their impact is significant when you are trying to compress a video to make the resulting file-size really small, but not as significant otherwise.  I would advise you to try x264's default settings, but make sure me=umh.  In the unlikely even that you are unhappy with the quality, try increasing subme to 8 or 9.

Well, the settings for the Bluray are done. me=umh is for the faster settings and me=esa for the slower settings, while subme is set to 10 is for both.

I'll work on the AVCHD settings later.

Jan said:Well, the settings for the Bluray are done. me=umh is for the faster settings and me=esa for the slower settings, while subme is set to 10 is for both.

Oh, I see.  I thought you guys were talking about x264's presets, but it seems you have derived your own "faster" and "slower" settings.  Yes; me=esa is a waste of time.

I didn't ever think I would say that, but I cannot see a difference on the screenshots from the fast vs. slow encodings Harmy posted.

We waited so long, there is no reason why we couldn't wait longer :-)

Take all the time you need

Nice to see the encode is running :-) I sometimes get greatly differing encoding time for the same video as well and I don't know why either. It slowing down gradually is pretty normal too. The second pass of my test encode ran at 1FPS average while the first was almost exactly as fast as on your end.

If you want to work with your computer while it encodes just use the task manager and change the priority of x264.exe to either "Lower than normal" or "Low". I advise against doing CPU heavy stuff, but for the rest it should be ok.

Harmy said:

To be honest, this is not as much about you waiting, as it is about me having my computer bogged down by encoding and unable to do anything else properly for so long. I mean, I wouldn't mind if I knew it was unavoidable but if it can encode that fast at first and then it slows down gradually, and if the same video with the same settings can take anywhere between 12hrs and 45minutes, it seems like there's something wrong somewhere.

Not sure what kind of a processor do you own but in the case that you have a multi-core processor and the encoder allows it you can always play with the affinity settings and let the main core do something else than encoding :-)